A comparative Study of Metaphor in English and Slovene Popular Economic Discourse
Download 149.63 Kb. Pdf ko'rish
|
A Comparative Study of Metaphor in English and Slo
|
Results of the Study
The following conceptual metaphors stand out as especially conspicuous both in English and Slovene economic articles owing to their clear and solid structure: , , . The transparent structure of the conceptual metaphor can be analysed as follows: . Entological correspondences. Entities in the domain of love relation- ships correspond systematically to entities in the domain of merg- ers: source: lovers love relationship courtship wedding marriage target: companies business relationship negotiations signing the contract merger . Epistemic correspondences. Our knowledge about love relationships is mapped onto knowledge about mergers. These two sentences give an example of the kind of knowledge that might be evoked: A man and a woman find each other attractive and they decide to get married. Two companies find a common interest and they decide to form a merger. The clear correspondences in the above metaphor suggest that it is a metaphor with great generative power as it seems to be an almost inex- haustible source for new and creative metaphorical expressions. These Managing Global Transitions A Comparative Study of Metaphor can often be found within one single article, as the example below will show. If we insert the following words in the missing spaces below: ( ) merger brief, ( ) Bayerische Vereinsbank () Bayerische Hypotheken- und-Wechselbank, ( ) corporate, () the rivals, () banks, () merger, ( ) cross-town rivals, () Vereinsbank, we can see that the article does not talk about a blazing love a ffair, but about the merging of two banks. Our ( ) . . . is a reminder that, when couples mate in a hurry for the wrong reasons, things can go wrong. . . . the marriage of ( ) . . . and ( ) . . . was announced in July . . . It serves as a lesson of what can go wrong if ( ) . . . couples leap too hastily into each other’s arms. It is also a reminder that old ( ) . . . can turn out to know much less about each other than they thought . . . ( ) . . . were scrambling to the altar. The ( ) . . . was touted by some as a match made in heaven. Here were two ( ) . . . that had long known and respected each other, but had only just realised they were in love. Yet this was not a love match. ( ) . . . went a-wooing mainly because it was the object of an unwanted suitor. (A Bavarian botch-up, The Economist, August ) This metaphor is fairly conspicuous also in the Slovene corpus, gen- erating a number of interesting conventional metaphors which support the metaphorical concept. Similarly as above, the metaphor has often been identified as a leitmotif within one single article. By inserting ( ) dosedanjimi konkurenti, ( ) združitev, () združitve, () namestnik, () tiskovni konferenci, ( ) raˇcunovodje in kadrovniki obeh podjetij in the missing spaces below, we can see that the words and expressions usually associated with weddings in reality refer to the merging of Daimler-Benz and Chrysler. Obstoj . . . v poroki z . . . ( ) po ameriških analizah je bilo lani povpreˇcno po dvesto . . . ( ) na teden in le polovica je uspešnih. Uverture v . . . ( ) pa poznamo: previdno in tiho snubljenje, namesto podoknice ‘podšankica’, po kateri se partnerja vdata drug drugemu, nato je na vrsti veliˇcastna poroka, na kateri se še ne ve, kdo je v za- konu glavna in kdo njen . . . ( ); poroko objavijo na veliˇcastni . . . ( ) . . . Po sijajnih medenih tednih seveda pride streznitev z vsakdan- jimi problemi, ki naj bi jih na prvi pogled reševali predvsem . . . ( ). (Vsaka poroka ni hazard, Manager, January .) While it can be argued that the marriage concept with regard to merg- ers was transferred from English to Slovene, the example also shows that once transferred, the metaphor develops in accordance to the cultural and linguistic paradigms of the target language. It therefore becomes Download 149.63 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
|